If the name Paul Harvey doesn’t come to mind reading the above title, you’re definitely not a digital immigrant. As a card-carrying member of that club, it’s my obligation to pass along some collected wisdom to digital natives. While this tribe has not quite yet taken over the world, there are some of us who still listen to radio, read newspapers and watch the news on TV. As a consumer and everyday citizen, that sparks a different conversation about defining communication, but I need to stay focused on our readers, and that’s the world of enterprise communications.

Before getting on that track – and picking up where my previous post left off – my Paul Harvey reference isn’t just wistful nostalgia. A two-minute Google search will give you the back story, with the essence being that things aren’t always as they appear, and after doing a bit of digging on your subject, you’ll often get a different and better story than what was initially being considered.

That’s what I’m getting at in my analysis here about business communications – if your thinking is limited to the legacy world you know, you’ll be missing the rest of the story in terms of what’s defining communications today.

Aside from that, I’m providing some back-handed advocacy for the value critical thinking. If online search is your idea of doing research, you won’t likely get the real story. That’s a cornerstone virtue of old-school journalism, and sadly it’s falling by the wayside as post-truth and alternate facts gain currency.

I digress, but not really. The communications landscape is evolving really fast, and IT decision-makers have to somehow keep pace. As noted in my last post, legacy models and legacy thinking will serve you well for what’s been done to date, and that’s person-to-person communication. However, the rest of the story is about machine-based communication, namely from PCs and/or the Internet.

This is the next frontier, and some of it is here now. You may never have complete information to make perfect choices, but these applications are valid forms of communication, and need to be considered in the broader analysis for technology investments. To illustrate, here are three basic scenarios that are shaping the rest of the story for business communications.

New mode #1 – person-to-machine

This is the most prevalent form of “new communication” in terms of getting beyond the legacy model of person-to-person interactions. We’ve actually been doing this for a long time, but anyone using an IVR menu tree for customer service will tell you that it’s not a great experience. I’ve been writing regularly about advances in AI, especially around speech technology, and Amazon’s Alexa for Business is indicative of what’s coming in the workplace.

It may be hard to think about asking Alexa to set up a meeting as “communication”, but you need to get past that. Just as person-to-person communication become richer as the parties get to know each other, the same happens with AI-driven speech. As those “conversations” become more natural sounding to the human ear – and they will – the experience will be little different from talking to a co-worker on the phone.

New mode #2 – machine-to-person

Momentum for this will follow person-to-machine, since it requires more AI capability. The most tangible applications will be notifications, and these could be text or voice-based. Simple use cases would be mass notifications, where a group – a team, a department, a regional office – receives a common message for all. This isn’t new, but AI brings richer possibilities for interactive communication, especially in real-time, where updates or changes can be made on the fly.

More complex examples would be for personalized notifications, customized for a particular worker. These could be basic notifications – say, as a checklist for what to bring to the meeting – but also ones that enable real-time interaction. To extend this scenario, the chatbot could ask some questions, such as will driving directions be needed, or will others be coming who need to be added to the meeting roster?

The main point is that the “communication” is initiated by the “machine”, which in this case is really a digital assistant. Not only does the assistant know this person’s calendar, contacts, schedule, etc., but over time, AI-driven speech technology will enable it to “know” the person well enough to engage in real-time conversation to get things done.

New mode #3 – machine-to-machine

This is the most futuristic scenario, and perhaps the hardest to assess since it doesn’t involve direct human communication. AI is a broad field, and when it comes to “communication”, this takes us along the path to the “singularity”, where machines/computers are nearly sentient and can function almost independently of humans. A much lengthier analysis is needed here, but a tangible example would be biometrics, which has many use cases in the enterprise, especially around authentication and security.

This goes well beyond fingerprints or voiceprints, where AI is being used for retinal scanning and facial recognition. In short, no human interaction is needed, as this data can be collected without our knowledge, and used entirely in an M2M environment to make decisions faster and even more accurately than humans could do on their own.

You may not need to consider this today, but the technology is being deployed now, and at some point, will become part of what constitutes “communication” in the enterprise. If these new modes are starting to resonate for your thinking about communication, then I can safely say now you know…the rest of the story.